What LSD tells us about human nature

Marc Lewis

I was in San Francisco last week, visiting my brother and revisiting the
years we spent there as young men. We walked through Golden Gate park ,
two guys in their sixties, admiring the giant sequoias, exotic gardens,
and gold-green pastures cascading westward to the ocean. And we
reminisced about our epic acid trip back in 1969, in that very place,
when we were primed for adventure and self-discovery.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to soothe existential discomfort with heroin

or amphetamine. But psychedelics have a value

There were four of us. We each swallowed our little purple tablets
Happy landing, guys! then started walking westward through the
park. About a half-hour later came surges of energy in our stomachs,
anticipation of something huge about to happen, excitement and fear as
though approaching the brink of an unknown waterfall. The park was so
beautiful. Bird song was everywhere, more nuanced than Id ever
noticed.

And then the world transformed. The patterns of branches, the smell of
the eucalyptus, the hubbub of other people, barking dogs, twittering
birds, blended and disintegrated at the same time. My sense of I
stretched, extending the boundaries of my perception like an unfurling
bouquet. I lost track of who I was, where I was, where I stopped and the
outside word began and then all that disintegrating, reconverging and
reshuffling somehow collapsed into a sonorous oneness, the deafening
drone of an utterly peaceful universe.

LSD was frightening, beautiful, and incomprehensible, life-changing

you might say educational with a wry grin for the uninitiated.
Not only that. Along with other psychedelic drugs it fashioned our
subculture, became symbolic of a unique time and place. It was the
beacon for a bunch of kids intent on discovering something true and
universal underlying the political and social absurdities of mainstream
society, Nixon, the Vietnam war, and all the rest of it.

What we sought in LSD is what humans have always sought meaning

hidden behind the transitory stupidity of human strivings that lead
nowhere. What we sought was the enlightenment that the Buddha yearned to
show us, and that for thousands of years has remained so elusive.

Was this just idealistic folly, drug fever? Did we have our heads up our
butts, imagining ultimate beauty because we were so completely in the
dark, so expertly narcissistic, so uninspired by the challenges that our
parents and figureheads wished us to face?

The Higgs boson of neuroscience

When I got home again, three days ago, a couple of neuroscientific
experiments had just been published in two journals simultaneously,
claiming to show exactly what went on in the brain when people took LSD.
Within two days, these findings migrated from scientific journals to
newspapers and media channels around the world, including the Guardian.
One of the works senior authors, David Nutt, a respected
neuropharmacologist, was quoted as saying This is to neuroscience what
the Higgs boson was to particle physics.

Though that might overstate his case, we can forgive Nutt his
enthusiasm: the findings are indeed extraordinary. Healthy volunteers
were injected with LSD while lying in an MRI scanner, and subjected to
several other neuroimaging methods at the same time. This amounted to an
arsenal of measurement that previous decades of psychedelic researchers
could only dream of. It wasnt Golden Gate park to be sure, but lying
in that magnetic chamber, with their eyes closed and their brains open,
with streams of numbers spilling from their lobes into data files soon
to be translated into images, these individuals watched LSDs intricate
hallucinations unfold behind their eyelids. And at the same time they
reported experiences of ego dissolution very much like those we
experienced in the park.

The normal etiquette of the brain requires segregating parts with

different functions. That etiquette was blown to bits

What was most remarkable about the research is that the degree of ego
dissolution reported by the participants correlated with a specific
neural transformation. To get through the pragmatics of day-to-day life
and the demands of survival, brain activity naturally differentiates
itself into several distinct networks, each responsible for a particular
cognitive function.

The three networks most closely examined by these scientists include a

network for paying attention to whats most salient, a network for
problem-solving, and a network for reflecting on ones own past and
future. There is also a natural segregation between high-level
(abstract) cognitive areas and low-level (concrete) perceptual areas,
most notably the visual cortex. These distinctions are thought to be an
essential design feature of a functional human brain.

The impact of LSD was to diminish connections within each of these

networks, relaxing the bonds that kept them intact and distinct, while
increasing the cross-talk among them. In other words, the normal
etiquette of the brain requires segregation among networks that have
different functions, and that etiquette was blown to bits.

Now most parts of the brain were communicating with most other parts of
the brain. Concrete sensory experiences, like vision, intermingled with
cognitive abstraction, and cognitive abstractions reshaped visual
imagery. Perhaps thats what explains the intricate fractal elaboration
that people see in the branches of a bush while tripping on acid. The
perception of salience and refinement of a sense of self are hashed
together like potatoes and gravy. The brains and their owners no longer
distinguish between what is most important, how to get stuff done, and
who in fact is the arbiter of the importance of the stuff that needs to
be done.

Religion v psychedelics
Some thousands of years ago, the Buddha defined human personality as the
recursive cycling of habits habits of acquisition, of craving and
grasping. They led to the pursuit pleasures that were sure to fade and
the avoidance of suffering that could not be avoided in a cycle of life,
ageing, and death. In response, his followers chose asceticism, the
practice of over-control. From the Buddhist monks who stripped
themselves of comfort and the Hindu sadhus with their rituals of self-
mortification evolved new religions.

There came endless lists of edicts that Jews, Muslims, and Christians
still impose on themselves: what one was not allowed to do, on which
days, with what consequences if one failed. Our attempts to wrest
freedom from habit, universality from local custom, truth from delusion,
have generally amounted to a set of rules to increase control, to
partition and segregate, to fashion hierarchies and obey codes.

It seems that our brains, with their intrinsic tendency to parse and
segregate, were well designed to veer toward over-control in response to
the hardships of existence. Or, more accurately, we came by our tendency
toward over-control because it manifests a key principle of brain
design.

But nature provided us with a different antidote to isolation and

irrelevance. LSD was created in a lab in Switzerland in the 1930s. But
other chemicals with the same psychedelic properties dwell in the flesh
of cactuses throughout North America (mescaline ), mushrooms found
across much of the northern hemisphere (psilocybin ), and the vines of
the Amazon (DMTayahuasca ). These naturally evolved chemicals undo
the locks our brains construct to keep us on the straight and narrow,
pursuing short-lived victories over inevitable failures.
Humans have gathered, cultivated, distilled, and manufactured all kinds
of drugs for thousands of years. Some of them relieve pain and bestow
comfort. Others provide the energy we sometimes need to complete our
tasks. And our old friend alcohol helps us relax and have fun. But the
psychedelics contribute nothing to our day-to-day functioning. Rather,
we use them to see the bigger picture, to connect with a reality that is
difficult to see using our normally functioning brains. We are literally
small-minded most of the time. And though meditation and mindfulness
nudge us toward openness, acceptance, and relinquishment of our egos,
humans continue to turn to psychedelics to wake us up to the
possibilities of a universal perspective.

Not all drugs are created equal, and I would never encourage anyone to
soothe their existential discomfort with heroin or amphetamine, both of
which I have taken. But psychedelics have a value I cant help but
admire. And now we understand more about how they do what they do. A
simple code unlocks the gates in our brains, gates that normally act as
walls.

I hope that these discoveries dispel just enough mystery to encourage us

to keep exploring.